Tag: Midwinter

I’ve had a number of people contact me with regard an interview with Jane Whittaker in Retro Gamer. It seems part of it details the origin story of Midwinter which took place in a Chinese restaurant in Liverpool and includes Mike, Jane, and Sid Meier.

Firstly, some caveats from myself. I didn’t personally know Mike during the time of Midwinter, not did I ever work in one of his companies, nor involved with their projects at that time. So I cannot vouch for the accuracies or inaccuracies of the interview myself.

What I do know is that a number of people have contacted me with stories of that time. People who knew Mike and people who knew Jane. From speaking with them, Mike’s family, original members of Maelstrom, and direct members of the Midwinter team, I believe I have enough corroborating information to suggest that the Midwinter parts of the interview are untrue as are much of the Mike Singleton references, but it also casts doubt on much of there rest of the interview.

It’s not my place to detail this. If other people want to go public with their information that would be their choice. I just wanted to publicly make it known that I think the Midwinter parts are complete hokum.

The only missing piece of Project Midwinter right now is artists. Long term I will be looking for artists to cover all the disciplines, but right now I need Texture Artist, Modeller/Animator, and Concept art. All the better if you can fill all those roles!

What I’m after is someone who can join the team part time while we get this project moving, and then be ready to go full time as soon as the funding starts. Or maybe you are so *pumped* at the idea of a Midwinter remake, that you want to volunteer your expertise just to help us get this off the ground.

I’m currently working on the desktop version of Lords of Midnight and will be moving on to Doomdark’s Revenge soon, but in the meantime there are a few things that I have been thinking about for the future.

There are two projects that I would like to get off the ground.

The first is obvious, I would like to develop “The Lords of Midnight: 30th Anniversary Edition”. Yep, that’s right, 2014 is 30 years since The Lords of Midnight was released. For an anniversary edition I would like to bring in 3d rendering. Not a full freeform 3d world, just render the landscape from 3d models and textures. Part of the reason for this would be to up the quality and style of the imagery, but currently using 2d images has a massive graphic overhead. For LoM, the textures to support 3 resolution sets, for the terrain images take up 25mb compressed and 150mb uncompressed. The other area I would like to work on is the AI and game mechanic. Part of me wants to leave he current LoM pretty much as it is, a few tweaks here and there, but ultimately, not to tinker to far. To make bigger changes, I think I would rather have it in another product.

The second project is one that I’ve been contacted about a number of times since releasing LoM, and that is Midwinter. Midwinter was for Mike Singleton, to 16bit what Lords of Midnight was to 8bit. I think Midwinter is ripe for a full on remake and it’s one that Mike was considering for some time.

So, I’ve had a few conversations, and here is where I’m at.

I’ve spoken with Mike’s family and had the ‘all clear’ there. I’ve also spoken with Dave Gautrey who was the Maelstrom developer on the original ST and AMIGA version. He is interested in getting involved as a consultant to the project. I’ve also had early conversations with someone who could help drive the project forward, and help with the hoops required for trying to raise funding.

Firstly I need to assemble a team. As I’m not directly going to be working on this I’m going to need programmers. I’m going to need artists, 3d modeller, Texture, Concept. And I’m going to need a designer.

The idea is to start working on this project in the background to try and bring together the idea of what we want to do with the game. This is going to be large scale development, and the initial core team will be on the project for a least 12 months and anywhere up to 2 years. That’s a budget of at least 300k. Now, unless I’m very lucky and someone out there has a spare 300k or so that they want to throw my way, getting a budget together isn’t going to be easy, nor quick. So I need to find some people who would be interested in joining the team long term, but in the short term would join the team, like the rest of us, as part timers. During the first few months, and without deadlines, the focus will be to define the game; drill down and expand upon the original design, put together concept art, and get a working visual engine running. As we go through these stages we will get a good idea of what the game is going to be, what assets we need to create, how long it’s going to take, what the team size needs to become, and therefore what our funding requirements are going to be, and how we are going to raise that cash!

(If you are interested in getting involved, give me a shout… )

Now, I’d really love to be able to do both projects especially the one … but then I think I’m looking at closer to 1m to fund two teams… anyone got a spare 1m that they’d like to use for funding reboots of the two best Mike Singleton games and two fantastic franchises… ?

EDIT: I thought I’d better clarify. The Project Midwinter is higher priority than LoM:30, if I could do both then I would, but if I can only do one, then it will be Midwinter. I’m putting the finishing touches to The Lords of Midnight desktop version ( Windows/Mac ) then I will start on Doomdark’s Revenge for the same platforms as LoM and in the same style. In the meantime, the planning for Midwinter is underway…